I should you warn you that this story (which mentions rape and self-harm) is depressing to read.

It happened during lights-out. Racheli’s homeroom teacher entered her dormitory room and saw the teenager and her good friend sitting close to each other on the bed. Too close, the teacher thought, and summoned Racheli (a pseudonym) for a talk.

But for Racheli, then in 11th grade at a prestigious ulpana — a high school for religious girls — it had all begun long before.

“I said to myself, ‘Okay, maybe this is an opportunity to get rid of it at last,’” she tells Haaretz. “I knew already from fifth or sixth grade that I had feelings for a girl who was a year older than me. It wasn’t sexual, but I thought about it a lot. I waited for opportunities to speak to her, I sensed that it was strange.”

Racheli kept those feelings to herself. A year passed, and then another. The objects of her love changed, but they were always female.

“I saw that it wasn’t going away and I knew it was a problem. I told a friend about it, and she said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not that bad, it will pass.’ And I also grew up in a community where such feelings don’t even have a name — it’s just not real,” says Racheli, who’s now in her 20s, adding, “When a well-known artist came out of the closet, for example, people in our circles would say he was doing it for the audience and the ratings. Or they’d say that ‘there are people who choose to be that way, and it’s bad. But you can’t be like that, because it’s not real.’ That’s a recurring motif, in my story too.”

Racheli entered the ulpana’s boarding school in ninth grade. A year later, a new girl also enrolled, she recalls: “At the end of the year we were friends. In 11th grade we were assigned to the same room, with two other girls, and then it became more than friendship.”

One of the challenges in the romantic ties that sprang up was finding ways to be alone in the crowded school. “We were very creative from that point of view. When the homeroom teacher came for lights-out that evening, we were only sitting close to each other — but she sensed something.”

What sort of approach did she take?

Racheli: “At first she said that it happens to a lot of girls of my age, and it’s known as a ‘dependency relationship’ with another girl. The main message was: Hashem [G-d] is placing an obstacle before you that you must overcome, and he is not confronting you with a test you can’t handle. So, either you go on doing it and sin, or you deal with it, restrain yourself and make a sacrifice.

“She said, ‘It’s like you have a car, and every time you’re with your friend you scratch it a little more. In the end it will be all dented — and who will want it?’”

Tough talk from someone with authority.

“I really wanted to please her, I wanted her to think I was a good person. She said she would prefer it if I did ‘nonsense with boys’ and not ‘something like this.’ In the religious world you’re not allowed to touch boys at all. You are allowed to touch girls, but sexual things are forbidden. To say that she would prefer me to violate shmirat negiah [the ban in Jewish religious law on physical contact with the opposite sex, other than in marriage] — wow, that would mean I’m a real criminal. I was ready to do anything to fix that.”

‘Spiritual intervention’

Conversion therapy, which professionals refer to as Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, has been part of the therapeutic domain for men and women both here and abroad for decades. Psychological and other treatment, including electric-shock therapy, sterilization, chemical castration, various types of behavioral therapy, nausea-inducing drugs, psychoactive substances and even sending people to sex workers — all these interventions have been based on a cultural assumption to the effect that homosexuality is not normative behavior, that it is a sin or a mental disorder that can be cured or somehow transformed.

In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association stopped categorizing homosexuality as a disorder. However, according to Aviya Barsheshet, a rehabilitative criminologist, practices aimed at changing a person’s sexual orientation haven’t disappeared, but often take on a spiritual or religious approach. “People who didn’t feel in harmony with their attraction to people of the same sex looked for solutions and relief through spiritual intervention, sometimes combined with psychological guidance.”

Virtually all of the studies that have been conducted on conversion therapy, its failures and the damage it does, have to date dealt with gay men; indeed there is much research-related and theoretical literature available on the subject. A careful online search for studies conducted in the field of conversion therapy for women did not turn up a single article from the past 13 years.

The comprehensive study Barsheshet completed last year on the effects of such therapy on women — as part of her studies for a master’s degree at Bar-Ilan University, under the guidance of criminologist Prof. Tomer Einat — is the first of its kind in Israel. It was based on interviews with 10 women who at the time identified as Orthodox.

How does conversion therapy for women work? According to Barsheshet, who also heads up efforts at the Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel to combat LGBTQ-phobia, a wide range of techniques is used. One involves the cancellation of a person’s “potential space,” a term coined by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott that refers to the therapeutic place in which a person feels freest to express all aspects of his or her personality, abilities and aspirations.

“The testimonies of women who took part in the research indicate an absolute annulment by the therapist of the potential space, with the aim of altering their same-sex orientation,” explains Barsheshet, 31, who grew up in a traditional home. “That is contrary to the ethical code of the Israel Psychological Association, according to which ‘psychologists shall respect their clients’ rights to espouse different approaches and views from theirs, and shall act without discrimination against a background of personal or cultural-social differences.’

“Many times,” she continues, “the agenda is declared right at the start: ‘We are here in order to change you. We will make you straight. You will leave here a normal person.’”

Additional methods used in conversion therapy, such as using LGBTQ-phobic rhetoric, attributing women’s same-sex attraction to what Judaism refers to as yetzer hara — the “evil inclination” — and gaslighting, induce a feeling of confusion and damage patients’ conceptual autonomy and their ability to make decisions about their life. The therapists involved run the gamut from psychologists to guidance counselors at ulpanot, to rabbis’ wives, to social workers. Some offer what they call “alternative” or “spiritual” treatment that is not necessarily religious.

“The world of therapy in Israel is extremely fragmented,” says Barsheshet, adding that the therapists she heard about from the interviewees in her study “kept throwing comments at them about how they were simply imagining things, saying that they were disoriented, that what they were feeling was not true attraction, that they didn’t know what was good for them. One participant related that the therapist told her, ‘You are attracted to women because you grew up with a lot of boys around you, so you don’t know how a woman is supposed to behave.’ Another woman was told, ‘You are drawn to women because you grew up with only girls around you.’ A third was told that she was too sexual, and another heard that she had ‘a problem with intimate relations’ and didn’t need psychological treatment, she needed a sexologist.

“One way or another,” declares Barsheshet, “the consistent message is that, ‘You are not a lesbian.’”

Shirel, one of the subjects in Barsheshet’s study, described to the researcher the harmful techniques used from the outset of her treatment. “I told the therapist that I was a lesbian and that I wanted to change that, and she immediately dismissed it and said: ‘Don’t worry, you are not a lesbian, who put that into your head? Everything will be fine, you are still young, lucky you came now. Some come at an older age, and so… they are lesbians.’ She made me think I was imagining things, as part of her hurtful erasure of my feelings.”

For her part, Racheli’s homeroom teacher referred her to the school’s therapeutic services. “I mainly remember a judgmental atmosphere, an accusatory gaze,” she told Barsheshet. “The question hovering in the background was ‘Why are you doing something so terrible, so ugly? Why can’t you just be normal?’”

Another widespread treatment technique cited by respondents involved linking same-sex orientation to mental disorders. Racheli’s therapist, for example, believed that the origin of her attraction to women lay in a childhood trauma.

Racheli: “The basic assumption was: You were not born like this, you underwent something. And in order to free yourself from it, you have to understand why it happened to you. Maybe you were sexually assaulted, maybe you didn’t get enough love, maybe it’s something related to your relationship with your parents. It’s always possible to dig and find painful points, but to find such a vulnerable place and to use it against me in order to prove why I am ‘that way’ — that was the worst moment in the therapy.”

Aversion therapy, aimed at reducing unwanted behavior by associating it with something unpleasant, is also widely used in this context. Indeed, the testimonies quoted in the study are extremely disturbing. T. relates that her therapist instructed her to document in a diary her attraction to different women, and every time the level of attraction exceeded what T. considered to be a level of 80 percent — to masturbate while thinking about men: “To actually imagine that I was sleeping with them and that they were penetrating me,” T. told Barsheshet. “To lie on the bed and think that a man is penetrating you, when you don’t want him to — that’s not far from rape.”

B. and Y., who were married to men when they took part in the study, said their therapists encouraged them to have sexual intercourse with their partners, even though doing so distressed them. Barsheshet says one participant told her that “after three months with no sexual contact with her husband she felt wonderful, and after she had to sleep with him she felt devastated. The therapist discerned this, but nevertheless urged her to sleep with him again.”

Conversations with the therapists included tips about having sex, suggestions to use sex props and doing “homework.” The latter might consist of drawing up a list of “what attracts me in men,” or repeatedly making statements like “I am not attracted to women.”

“The therapist said that such declarations enter the consciousness and then influence behavior,” Y. related. “She also gave me examples of married women who decided to have relationships with women and in the end remained alone; they no longer had a family. She [the therapist] told me to think about whether that would be worth it to me.”

In some cases aversion therapy is enhanced by ritual elements. Shirel told us that her therapist, for example, had her participate in a sort of ceremony based on a rather original theory that the therapist herself had concocted.

Shirel: “I told her that I’d had a twin bother at an early stage of [my mother’s] pregnancy and that he hadn’t survived. I should point out that this was at a stage when they didn’t know the sex of the embryo, but I said it was a boy because that’s what I thought it was. Together we created a whole story based on the fact that because of an unconscious feeling of guilt, I had been compensating for the fact that he wasn’t born by having appropriated a ‘male side.’”

The next stage, involving parting from the “twin brother,” caused Shirel deep discomfort. “We held a kind of funeral. The implicit message was that I needed to be more feminine in order to be straight. Everyone who knows me knows I have a tomboy side, and the idea was for me to make that side disappear: to put on makeup, to refrain from supposedly masculine activities like playing soccer, or to avoid wearing Blundstone shoes, which were popular at the time among female settlers but were considered masculine.

“On one hand, it’s superficial,” Shirel notes, “but in practice it’s sophisticated manipulation — because you are constantly erasing more and more of yourself.”

There’s a clear attempt to change women.

Shirel: “There’s a message of ‘Fake it till you make it,’ and if not, then simply ‘Fake it.’ It would be wonderful if you wanted it [heterosexuality], but even if you don’t want it, do what’s needed, even if it breaks you.”

A type of brainwashing

Why did these women continue go to therapy sessions and carry out instructions that caused them such deep distress? In Barsheshet’s view, such behavior is related to the perceived status — both professional and religious — of the therapists.

“A famous study by [American psychologist Stanley] Milgram in 1963 found that people tend to obey orders from an authoritative source, even to the level of endangering others or themselves. Similarly, despite the voice of logic the women heard in their heads, there was total acceptance of the therapists engaged in conversion therapy and absolute cooperation with their directives.”

Still, some of the patients plucked up the courage to stop the treatments at their own initiative. For Shirel, social media was helpful. “I listened to music by lesbians and I followed groups on Facebook that have helped bring about a true revolution among the religious public. I remember there was a moment when I understood that to go to therapy was simply to go against myself, to get into a state of mind where I believed there were bad things in me that I needed to erase from myself.”

She also immersed herself for the first time in the writings of the late […] Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, aka Rav Shagar, who addressed the issue of Judaism and postmodernism. “He gave me air to breathe,” Shirel says. “The infinite loop — which involved finding a theory that would explain the reason I became the way I am — ate away at me internally, a little more each day.

“According to Rav Shagar, even if I wasn’t born that way [i.e., homosexual], it didn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t G-d’s will. Social construction can also be the will of Hashem and we must respect that. Even if something happened to me at the age of 3, it didn’t happen for no reason. It’s a long story, all this gritting of teeth vis-à-vis G-d, but in the end I understood that G-d wanted me to live a good life in which there is love.”

Racheli sought treatment at the request of her homeroom teacher, but was offended by the therapist and told her teacher she had decided to stop going.

“I believed the therapist — the possibility that something had happened to me in childhood, but throughout the therapy I felt that she didn’t respect me. That she wasn’t hearing me, that she was denigrating me,” she explains. “The teacher said I could do different therapy, outside the ulpana, but that my parents would have to enter the picture because they would have to pay for it. I begged her, ‘This is the secret of my life, that I kept hidden for so many years, please don’t tell my parents.’ She said there was no choice — and told them.”

Racheli’s parents did not take the news well, and persuaded her to see a private therapist. “At first she said told me the therapy didn’t have a specific purpose and that we would get to wherever we would get to. But in retrospect, it turned out that she told my parents, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll get over it and all will be well.’”

So it wasn’t just a situation of your trust in one person being shattered, but a number of factors.

Racheli: “Today I know how easy it is to destabilize a person’s concept of reality. For years I looked for validation — to be told, ‘Yes, it’s possible that this is who you are.’ I knew what I felt inside, but the people around me and the therapists told me that it wasn’t my nature, that it would pass in the end. I thought that I could still marry a man, even though that didn’t interest me at all, so for years I dated boys.”

How did you feel?

“Like something in me had died. During that period I was already a student in a midrasha [equivalent of men’s yeshiva] and I abstained entirely from women. It was such a dull year, I was lifeless. A year later I was with a woman and felt like I had broken a fast. It’s a very powerful feeling.”

We are in the living room of the apartment Racheli and her (nonreligious) partner rent. Beyond the balcony the lights of the city glitter. The beit midrash (religious study hall) she attends, and which accepts her with open arms, is walking distance away. Its library is replete with books of Gemara and Mishnah.

“I didn’t really leave religion,” she insists. “My whole world was built on fear of transgressions, and I no longer perceive religion like I did at the ulpana — with all the sins, transgressions and commandments. I went on a journey, I relinquished the religion I grew up with and found a vitalizing Judaism.”

There are those who maintain, by contrast, that it’s impossible to be both a lesbian and religious.

Racheli: “It’s said of the Torah that it can be an elixir of death and an elixir of life, and I feel that a Torah that coerces me to act against my heart is an elixir of death. A Torah in which I can be religious, learn in havruta [study with a companion], observe Shabbat and also be with someone whom my soul truly loves — that is a Torah of life.”

[…]

Because conversion therapy takes place in various frameworks and is thus under the radar, it’s not possible to estimate its scale. Along with the interviewees in this article, Barsheshet also believes that it’s a more widespread phenomenon than most people think: “It takes women months and years, if ever, to understand that what they went through in conversion therapy. There is no law barring it, and in the absence of legislation, it continues to take place uninterruptedly. In other words, as we speak, conversion therapy is being conducted on teenagers of both sexes, for men and women, and also for young people on the trans spectrum.”

Can it be said that the more devout, conservative and closed a community is, the more prevalent conversion therapy will be among its members?

“Not necessarily. The religious community in Israel is very diverse today. There are communities characterized by feminist consciousness and equal rights. The exposure issue is also meaningful. Meaning, when I see around me LGBTQ figures, or I meet LGBTQ families — that normalizes the situation for me. Each case is really different, which only illustrates that religious society is dynamic and is undergoing considerable change.”

Nadav Schwartz, a social entrepreneur in the religious LGBTQ community and a lecturer on the subject, observes that while the number of men undergoing conversion therapy is on the decline, the number of women subject to that form of treatment is increasing.

Schwartz attributes the change of approach to religious people who came out and spoke openly about themselves, including as part of the “Our Faces” project in 2015, involving the documentation on video of the stories of over 70 religious LGBTQ people. In addition, more and more religious and nonreligious men have spoken openly during the past decade about the conversion therapy they underwent and the harm it did them.

“Even people who in the past openly supported conversion therapy are today in a completely different place,” says Schwartz, who himself underwent such therapy. “I don’t see anyone being interviewed with their face exposed, saying that their therapy worked.”

If so, why do you think conversion therapy for women is flourishing?

Schwartz: “Conversion therapy was tried on men for years and wasn’t successful. So there is more awareness of the subject among men, and more resistance by men, whereas among women the subject is talked about less. What didn’t work with men is now being implemented with women, even if the therapy is masked with terms like ‘reorientation,’ ‘therapy to find one’s true self’ or ‘examination of sexuality.’”

“Once conversion therapy became anathema to the public, organizations supporting it simply switched gears and started to operate under the guise of providing sex therapy or family therapy,” explains Hadas Benayahu Elyasyan, a clinical psychologist and former executive director of Shoval, an organization that works to promote acceptance of LGBTQ people in religious society.

“They are not declaring explicitly that they engage in conversion therapy,” she says, “but in practice it happens — in clinics, in professional training programs and at conferences. It just has a different wrapping.”

(Emphasis original.)